As a jury member of the first hour, I have nothing but positive things to report about CONTENTshift. Our direct contact to the startups was rewarding in every way possible. It moved the founders forward but also gave a boost to participating companies by means of new ideas and contacts or even direct investment. Detlef Büttner
Lehmanns Media is one of the leading specialist publishing houses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and part of the Thalia bookselling company since 2021. In 21 competence centers in 18 cities, they serve end customers as well as large customers such as public and scientific libraries, hospitals and clinics, corporations and companies in the public sector, industrial enterprises and major law firms.
The company adresses their end customers via their brick-and-mortar-business as well as their webshop, moreover, they offer customized solutions and services around the topic of information managment to major clients: www.lehmannspro.de, www.lehmannsbib.de.
Detlef Büttner was born in 1960 and has been Managing Director at Lehmanns Media since 2009. After training to become a bank clerk and bookseller, he worked as Head of Marketing in the development of Gemini (Kaufhof AG). From 1993 to 2004, he was active at the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, most recently as Managing Director for Spektrum Akademischer Verlag and Urban & Fischer. After the sale of the publishing companies to Elsevier, he went to work at Verlag Dr. Otto Schmidt and the Sack-Mediengruppe in 2004, where he remained all the way up to his move to Lehmanns as Managing Director.
With more than 280 bookstores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Thalia is the German-speaking world’s retail book market leader. The company is also active as a cross-channel retailer, offering professional, customer-oriented advice and inspiring shopping experiences both in the “real” world of traditional bookstores and in the “virtual” world on their online bookshop. Thalia combines a long and storied bookselling tradition with considerable dedication to the promotion of reading and culture. In this “best of many worlds,” the company has also demonstrated a consistent commitment to fostering new digital opportunities in the realm of books. In March 2013, Thalia joined with several book-industry partners and Deutsche Telekom to launch tolino, a brand that has since generated seven e-readers, including most recently the tolino vision 4 HD. In 2017, the Tolino Alliance announced that the Canadian e-reading provider Rakuten Kobo would replace Deutsche Telekom as its tech partner. Today, this alliance offers over 1 million e-books, the largest in the German-language e-book retail industry. Thalia was founded in Hamburg in 1919 in the building of that city’s renowned Thalia Theater. Visit https://www.thalia.de
Dr. Leif Göritz is a managing partner and chairman of the supervisory board at Thalia. He holds a doctorate in economics and is also known for his work as a business consultant and digital entrepreneur. Before coming to Thalia, Göritz was managing director at an international business incubator and project manager at The Boston Consulting Group. As the founder of several successful digital companies, but also as a partner at the Berlin-based Smart Mobile App Factory and council to the management board of Herder Verlag, Göritz is very familiar with the challenges facing startups and companies seeking to digitise their business.
Over the centuries, the book industry has transformed itself time and again in radical ways. In the beginning, these changes often arose out of publishing houses that had their own printing presses and bookstores. After that came the splitting up into publishers and bookstores. At the moment, we have an industry that is stationary, online and – for many years now – also completely digital, that is, based on apps, eBooks and eReaders, such as the Tolino. Although it might not seem so from outside, the pace of innovation in the industry has increased significantly. For us, CONTENTshift is a book industry platform that enables founders – and their innovative new ideas – to more gain access to publishers and retail markets in a more efficient way. Today, the industry as a whole is working together to find pioneering solutions for the readers of tomorrow: Reading 3.0. Dr. Leif Göritz